As a result of improvement in processing technology, it is now possible to put millions of transistors in an integrated circuit. This increases the amount of processing power of the integrated circuit. However, the processing power may be wasted if there are insufficient input-output (I/O) resources to transfer data to and from the integrated circuit. High speed I/O transceivers alleviate this problem by increasing the data transfer speed of the I/O resources. In order to improve performance, circuit designers have started to integrate high speed transceivers into integrated circuits.
Another effect of the increase in the number of transistors is that it is possible to place more circuits in an integrated circuit. This means that the complexity and costs of designing an integrated circuit also increase. As a result, many vendors want to be able to sell the same integrated circuit to different markets. Further, users also like to use the same integrated circuit to support different applications because of the high costs of learning and using a complicated integrated circuit. For example, it is desirable for the same product to support a variety of communication protocols, such as Gigabit Ethernet, XAUI, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, etc. Consequently, there is a need to have a flexible high speed transceiver that can be used for different purposes.